statement
In 1988, I was born and raised in Korea. Throughout the 29 years of my life, I've been addressed by many names; sometimes a woman, a student, a worker, or an artist. At every moment in my life, I've tried to read the coordinates of where I stood and listened to what I was being called. And at every moment, I was conscious of the weight of those names. As a result, I've come to possess several faces, voices, and gestures according to the many names.
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As (2011) - a framed and hung self-quote - candidly illustrates, the troubles that I had encountered as a woman having no 'money' or 'penis' became the theme for my early works. I wanted to talk about withstanding the burden of double discrimination of class and gender in the society in a witty way. This idea was represented in the works between 2010 and 2013, such as the white porcelain with sexual images drawn in traditional designs to look like a counterfeit or paintings that parodied the ‘Haengsildo’, a traditional painting that preaches patriarchal virtues.
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My admiration for and investigation into self-governing life, appreciating oneself according to one's own standards as opposed to the rules and standards set by the society, has led me to take 'masturbation' as an approach to appreciate and comfort oneself. This resulted in the series which created podiums or stages for self-praising and the series which allowed various types of masturbation to be imagined and indulged visually. The visual language of sexual objects and metaphors in my works is not an expression of instinctive desire. It rather focuses on sexuality being treated with double standards in the society. This intends to subvert the roles and standards imposed on women in the society and attempts to reconstruct the relationship between an object with another.
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My work until 2013 mostly focused on 'characters and roles' to create tools that allowed oversetting the given roles. Since then, I am focusing on the stage, in other words, the background and situation on which the character stands. I take the approach of representing a particular situation in visual signs. A scene represented in this way does not have a role, script or instruction. The scene aims at being a location in which unspecified multiple spectators can become the protagonist of the scene or a flexible picture which allows them to intervene and modify the scene. Would an 'installation-scene' created in this way function as a 'stage-picture' filled with microscopic possibilities? I am in the process of making various attempts for this question.